Romney and the D’Souza Doctrine

Byron York documents the despair of Mitt Romney’s core supporters, who long that he be “bolder” and “more aggressive” in attacking Barack Obama. The headline of York’s Examiner piece suggests that the entire Republican Party is now in the process of “beg[ging]” Romney for a “tougher campaign.” During a rally in Toledo, Ohio on Tuesday, the candidate seemed willing to temporarily oblige:

“[The president has] a vision of government that is entirely foreign to anything this nation has ever known,” he announced. “That is not the America I know. That is not the America that built Ohio. That is not the America that we’re going to restore.” (Notice the subtle invocation of the infamous “Build That” trope.)

So, what are the features of this America which Romney apparently aspires to “restore”? Does he mean America as it existed under two terms of George W. Bush, wherein middle class incomes stagnated, wars of aggression were launched, backroom deals with megacorporations were routine, and conservative media offered nary a critical whimper? Or is Romney hoping to “restore” the America he knew as CEO of an elite private equity firm, wherein he oversaw billions of dollars sloshing around international markets via complex financial instruments? Is that the America not so “foreign” to ordinary citizens, the America for which he pines?

Perhaps it’s pointless by now to note that the policies pursued under Barack Obama’s centrist-to-liberal (and in some respects verifiably hawkish/right-wing) Administration are certainly not–by any reasonable assessment–indicative of a cataclysmic departure from U.S. governmental norms. Yet Romney simply asserts this as unmitigated truth, without offering much in the way of evidence–aside from the platitudes which have thus far emblematized his campaign. Then on Wednesday, in a fit of schizophrenia, Romney’s operation pivoted without explanation to a far softer critique of the president, releasing a television ad in which the candidate asserts: “President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families…”

So which is it? Either Obama is “foreign” and dangerous and has cynically gamed the system to keep 47 percent of Americans dependent on government so that they’ll vote for him–as Romney strongly implied in the video released last week of his closed-door remarks to wealthy donors–or Obama genuinely does “care” about the American people and is simply misguided. It would seem that these notions are incompatible with one another, yet Romney freely espouses them both near-simultaneously, without compunction.

Why is Romney finding it impossible to offer a consistent, sensible conservative critique of the Obama Administration (one surely exists)? Perhaps because he has marinated for so long in the GOP’s insulated and intellectually-stunted bizarro universe, where facts have fallen out of favor and white-hot demagogic rhetoric is all the rage. He cannot communicate normally with most Americans, who generally do not despise the president on a personal level.

But here’s the most offensive part of Romney’s floundering shtick: In propounding these inflammatory talking points, he echoes the sentiments of none other than Dinesh D’Souza, whose “2016: Obama’s America” propaganda “documentary” has become a smash hit at the box office. The central theme of D’Souza’s film is that deep-down, Obama harbors seething hatred for America, and thus his presidency has been designed to bring about its downfall by a host of surreptitious means. It’s a revolting hour-and-a-half of cinema, targeted at the most angst-ridden and pliable Americans looking for answers–Americans who in turn have certainly provided Mr. D’Souza with a sizable financial reward.

More importantly, however, the film perpetuates this bizarre conspiracy theory that Obama is some kind of radical “Manchurian Candidate” whose agenda–as Romney put it–is “foreign,” and who poses such an imminent danger to Americans’ way of life that he must be replaced at all costs in November. Lacking any coherent critique of the past four years, nor any positive platform of his own, Romney has now adopted this line of argument–a line which was once relegated to the ugly Internet fringes.

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13 Responses to Romney and the D’Souza Doctrine

I don’t know who Mr. Tracy is but not a word of what he wrote here is wrong.

Eviscerating, not just of Romney but the Republican Party now.

Perhaps the only thing that might be added is that this “Obama is foreign/not American” meme can certainly smell a little of playing off Obama’s race. And I’m ordinarily one to hate that constant, convoluted and crappy accusations of racism made against every conservative, it seems.

But even if it *isn’t* true that this is what’s behind it, I will say this: It’s just a further mark of the stupidity and bottom-feeding nature of the present Republican Party that it has to know still that it *does* smell like that to millions, and it doesn’t care.

So first the Party makes it embarrassing to be in any way identified with it or with conservatism, and now it’s making it positively repugnant.

Ah yes “2016”. Or if you wish, whether after this election if he loses or after the second term is over, he moves on to become head of the UN where he starts fulfilling prophecy as the “anti-christ” ala the “Left Behind” books. A LOT of people think that.

I’m around 60 and well remember the ’64 race and I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of how a candidate is being portrayed. We know that the early elections in this country were ugly (talk of Jefferson’s black children with Sally, Jackson’s wife, and so much more) but the stuff being thrown at BHO from the “right” has just reached whole new levels.

The real stuff regarding him is bad enough, why bother throwing all this at him? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t wait for this election to come and go and as conservative as I’ve been all my life, I get to the point some days where I almost don’t care who wins, just end it already.

More I think about this election, the more I accept that this a reverse Democrat ’72 election. (It won’t be a landslide but no Watergate). I don’t know of a Prez had been so hated by the opponents since Trickie Dick and hippie hatred embolded his Presidency with much of the population. Much like the movie over-stated 2016 movie. It plays well to talk radio but it seems very far reaching. Thoughts?

(On top of that, Obama & Nixon had foreign policy victories, Osama and China visit, that really cut the foreign policy attacks. Also the opposing parties primaries were terrible.)

I agree with the those in the thread who’ve picked up on the subtle(?) racist tones in Romney’s portrayal of Obama as “foreign”. I’d say though that Romney’s labeling of Obama as “foreign” also invokes the inaccurate and now-cliched spectre of the president as a “marxist” or “socialist”.

Obama is not a marxist or a classical socialist. If the president wins reelection, I don’t predict that he will nationalize energy production or distribution. Similarly, I don’t anticipate that he will force Americans into centrally-planned mega-factories and trade in their Lexuses for Ladas. At worst, Obamacare is a social democratic endeavor no more collectivist than public insurance schemes in Canada or the EU. And yet, most Americans have little or no ability to realistically contextualize Obamacare. For this reason, Obama embodies the foreign, or policies which many voters cannot explain without using inaccurate cliches or tropes.

Sure, the GOP base might ardently desire Romney to break from his milquetoast demeanor. Yet, the base also responds best to the reinforcement of stereotypes. Romney must play to these stereotypes to keep the base on the boil, even if doing so obscures any substantive criticism of Obama’s platform.

Obama is foreign, but so is Romney too. One is a Labor candidate, and the other is lilud. That is actually the problem for Americans- realizing that we are now a part of greater Israel, this understanding will I’m sure help them come to grips with reality.

How can Romney accuse Obama of being a foreigner when so many fear that Romney himself has more in common with foreigners – especially really rich ones – than with regular Americans? He has held fund raisers in foreign countries and taken huge amounts of money from rich foreigners, including an Israeli citizen who made the money in China. He sent American jobs to foreign countries. He has promised a foreign leader (Nethenyahu) that he would keep sending Israel billions of dollars every year while the American economy tanks and millions are out of work, and that he would waste even more money and send even more Americans to their deaths in a return to the Bush neoconservative military policy of foreign intervention that already wrought strategic havoc and economic disaster.

Given the candidates we are offered, it appears that regular Americans don’t have either a voice or a vote in this election.

D’Souza himself is certainly one of the oddest psychological cases, himself, outside Michelle Malkin, especially if he believes any of what he and John Sullivan have put together.

He actually defends colonialism as a great positive, not an evil.

What was really funny, though, was in the bit about all his speculations supposedly being “proven” by a triviality – a bust of Churchill being returned to England – you see, Dinesh intones ominously, “Britain helped us defeat Hitler,” which supposdly justifies imperialism as the highest order of world good. (No doubt, he thinks Ghandi’s assassination a positive, too.)

Intonations of Obama-as-Hitler? Well, it was Britain under attack, in the war with Germany from 1939, while we entered late. Britain didn’t “help” us, we helped them.

Who knows what happened to the Johnny-Come-Lately-American D’Souza back in his native India, but he has a thin grasp on the actual American history and psychology pf the rest of us – a useful lack to avoid the cognitive dissonance of extreme shilling for neoconservatism.

There is so much to criticize the Obama administration for, which are policies D’Souza actually supports, but the fantastical prevarications D’Souza offers up discredit D’Souza intellectually – even though he tries to gain stature by invoking his position as “a college President,” instead he makes himself intellectually dishonest and ludicrous.